Words for the wise from the mouth of a fool.
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The weblog of Seth Johnson -------------- INKSLINGER.ORG -------------- OD ARCHIVES -------------- FEEDS Posts:  Shared Items:
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Saturday, October 29, 2005
Explosion
+ Manhole Cover
+ Skylight
+ Freight Elevator
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Most Unlikely
Death Ever
(via Making Light)
Friday, October 28, 2005
Via Metafilter, the very cool Death in Sakkara, a pulp adventure Flash game. Not all that hard, mind you, but a lot of fun.Wow: Following a link from Jason's blog and then digging a little deeper I found that 22 unreleased Elliott Smith demo tracks have been posted to the web.
The clerk helping you at Kinko's might just be the next highly trained soldier taking their skills behind enemy lines...to run a PSYOPs deployable print production center (via DefenseTech, and over on the fascinating Special Operations Technology online magazine.)
Imagine hearing a distant but persistant sound that bugs you. Now imagine that the sound goes on for four years. Welcome to the story of the Kokomo Hum.
Now there's a new sensory mystery. New Yorkers were puzzled by the oddly pleasant smell that wafted through the city last night:
An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night. Arturo Padilla walked through it and declared that it was awesome. "It's like maple syrup. With Eggos. Or pancakes," he said. "It's pleasant."
Mr. Padilla was not alone. Reports of the syrupy cloud poured in from across Manhattan after 9 p.m. Some feared that it was something sinister. There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to look into it.
By 11 p. m., the search had turned up nothing harmful, according to tests of the air. Reports continued to come in from as far north as 112th Street shortly before midnight. In Lower Manhattan, where the smell had begun to fade, it was back, stronger than before, by 1 a.m.
No source or explanation has yet been found from the smell. The Metafilter thread discussing the smell has a lot of on-the-ground reports from NYC Mefites from Park Slope to West Harlem, but no solution.
Happily, though, since it was the source of the Kokomo Hum link above, it does offer the answer to that mystery.
You've been watching The Colbert Report, so of course you've been to The Colbert Nation to recieve your marching orders from Stephen and his duly authorized cadre of uber-fans. There's much to be digested on the site, I know, but I particularly reccommend the exceprt from Stephen's novel Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.
Bad news: Keith Parkinson died of complications from leukemia on Wednesday. I talked with him several times at GenCon and back when I was in publishing, and it was always pleasant to discover that he was not only a fantastic artist but also a nice guy.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Interesting: due to current events, a week of Doonesbury will be cancelled and replaced with re-run strips.
Rolling Bomber Special, the tale of Katori Shintaro, who may be (but probably isn't) the most dangerous man on Earth (via Metafilter.)Over at Urban Dead, they've posted a snapshot of the current playerbase. Surprisingly, the survivors appear to be winning.
"In mid-2002, nine months after activation, I upgraded to a program called Hi-Res, which gave me 16 channels - double the resolution! An audiologist plugged my processor into her laptop and uploaded the new code. I suddenly had a better ear, without surgery. In theory, I would now be able to distinguish among tones five notes apart instead of 11."
Beneath the coating of technical detail, the touching and remarkably human story of one man's quest to upgrade his own cybernetics and train his cochlear implants to hear music again.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
"Throw down your heads and get up against the wall!" police in Hollywood shouted at the movie cartoon character from "The Incredibles" and his sidekick, Elmo the Muppet.
...Mr. Incredible and Elmo said they were taken into custody at gunpoint and driven in handcuffs by police car to the front of the Kodak Theatre. There they claim they were paraded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before shocked tourists and other boulevard impersonators.
No, it's not fanfic. It's a true story from Hollywood Boulevard where some claim that costumed street performers are hassling tourists (via Mark Evanier.)
You are standing on the floor of a bedroom.
Your Katamari is 10cm.
> N
There is a PAPER CLIP here.
> ROLL CLIP
I do not know what a CLIP is.
> ROLL PAPER CLIP
You roll up the PAPER CLIP.
You are standing on the floor of a bedroom.
> LOOK KATAMARI
Your Katamari is 10.2cm.
Katamari Damacy: The Text Adventure (via Boing Boing.)
I'm a sucker for artifacts of fictional realms. So thanks to James who spotted The Map Realm, geography remixed, reimagined, and created wholesale.Sunday, October 23, 2005
"Guess how many games of Halo 2 have been played since November 9th 2004. Go on. I dare you. If you said 324,362,454 then congratulations. You win a slightly baffled expression.
...Man-hours played in Matchmade games: 184,137,245. That means (in plain English) that the total number of hours spent playing Halo 2 by individual players is over 180 million. ... And just in case you're wondering, that is roughly 21,006 years. Way longer than human civilization has existed.
...The Halo player who has played the most games to date has played a staggering, mind-boggling 14,919 games, spending an average of six hours per day, and playing around 71 games. Per day.
...If everyone had worked a $6/hr job instead of playing Matchmade games, they would have earned $1.1B. Of course, that's minimum wage. If we went with say, the median wage of Minnesota, then it would be more like 3.2 billion smackeroos."
Stunning Halo statistics, compiled and released by Bungie (via I'm a Human Inbox.)
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